1. Technical Field
The present application relates generally to an improved data processing system and method. More specifically, the present application is directed to a method and system to identify conflicts in scheduling data center changes to assets based on policies, service level agreements, change schedule, and impact analysis in an integrated manner.
2. Description of Related Art
A data center is the department that houses computer systems and related equipment, including the data library. The term “data center” often refers to any combination of hardware and software that is used to satisfy information technology (IT) requirements, including any servers, storage, network infrastructure, and so forth. Many companies employ services management applications to configure, schedule, and execute changes to the data center.
IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) is an important element of service management. ITIL® is one of the more comprehensive as well as non-proprietary and publicly available sets of guidelines for best practices in IT services management, owned by the British Office of Government Commerce (OGC). Each library module provides a code of practice intended to improve IT efficiencies, reduce risks, and increase the effectiveness and quality of IT services management and infrastructure.
A change management process is a component of services management that allows administrators and other authorized users to make changes to the data center. An operational management product (OMP) is a product that executes a change to the data center. An OMP may be found anywhere a task is effectuated. For example, an OMP may install firmware on a storage device. A user makes a change request, and the change management process issues a task to an OMP to effectuate the change. The OMP may then provide a response back to the change management process when the change is completed or if the change request cannot be satisfied.
A change request may affect a configuration item (CI) and may require a resource, such as a person in charge of the configuration item. Scheduling a change in a data center requires a lot of knowledge about the data center, such as affected business applications, affected service level agreements (SLAs), existing schedule of changes and other change requests, availability of resources, activities related to the change, etc. Current change management products may only take into account a small subset of this information. As a result, a user must consult multiple sources of information and to make sense out of that information manually.
For instance, a current IT management product may support associating a change task to particular people. Thus, the user may determine whether a resource, a person, is available at a particular time before scheduling the change request. However, the product may not take into account other information, such as what business applications are affected, how the change may affect SLAs, or whether the change request will conflict with other changes on the same CI. As another example, an IT management product may look at resource dependency, e.g., resources on which a specific resource is dependent. Again, even with this function, the user must still consult a wide range of information sources before scheduling a change request.